Mike Coughlin joins us for our second MMA show. We talk about the Pride 33 show, including Nick Diaz triumphing over Takanori Gomi, Dan Henderson’s amazing feat, and the future of the company, plus Pride groupies, American Home Mortgage, Brock Lesnar, Wanderlei Silva has dysentery, no one can pronounce Sokoudjou, and Kurt Angle shootfights a coatrack. Almost 45 minutes of MMA fun!

Mike was on last July, talking MMA. You can read Mike’s articles at F4online.com, and hear him on the Five Star Radio show – a free one should be up this week. We thank Mike for coming on the show again.

If you’ve got any feedback on this show or any other, we’d love to hear it. Either leave a comment below, or contact Joe at joegagne AT charter DOT net. Thanks for listening – if you enjoyed a show, we’d quite appreciated if you told your friends, or at least told us!

You can download any of our previous editions below. Right click and save them to your computer to take a listen.

Not much worth seeing. I mean, it was fine, but I’ve finished and can’t recall anything except how bad Shad is. On one hand, they know, because JTG wrestles 90% of each and every match, but on the other hand, they had Shad and Shelton do a three reversal finish.

I had this theory that Super Crazy’s ballooned up because of the free buffets at WWE tapings – that’s not the sort of thing they have in Mexico, as every luchador notes after they go. The thing is, they theoretically have food at SmackDown shows, even if it is the b show. One can only assume that the SmackDown catering sucks.

I’m not emotionally prepared to talk about UIC beating Loyola. I may never be ready. Tournament win or bust.

That’s 1! Schilb took over the game (Mid Majority writes some nice things about him and the team), but I was still worried when everyone was fouling out and he was left to be the ball handler. Rebounds late can be great. The win causes Loyola to leap 17 spots in the RPI to 90. Wright State is 83, but I believe has clinched a NIT spot by winning the confrence, though I don’t know how they actually did that.

Loyola beat Butler by 4 @ Butler
Butler beat Loyola by 4 @ Loyola

The third game, if Loyola beats the 6-7 winner (one never knows for sure with this team), would be a neutral site game at Wright State. I guess it’s gonna have to go to OT?

The other question is – with the SIU loss (not bad) and the Loyola loss (kinda bad), is Butler in trouble if they lose again? Butler’s dropped to 31 in the RPI, which is going to make it a bit scary. They should make it, but who knows.

Matt Foy joins us again to discuss the happenings in Ring of Honor. Matt was at both the Friday and Saturday ROH shows and we discuss Joe/Morishima, Homicide’s title reign and his future with the company, the new faction wars in ROH, departures and returns, plus concussions, the No Remorse Corps, and get well wishes to Rob Naylor. Over 50 minutes of fun!

If you’ve got any feedback on this show or any other, we’d love to hear it. Either leave a comment below, or contact Joe at joegagne AT charter DOT net. Thanks for listening – if you enjoyed a show, we’d quite appreciated if you told your friends, or at least told us!

You can download any of our previous editions below. Right click and save them to your computer to take a listen.

Last year, Loyola Chicago got to 19-11, and didn’t get any post season action. Their RPI ended up being pretty dreadful – 138’s not going to get it done, even when there were 105 spots. Still, that was the best record in two decades This year, the Ramblers seem headed to a 21-11 record (best since a 27 win season in 84-85), and still won’t make the post season. Winning 40 games over two years and not making either the NCAA or the NIT once seems pretty impossible, but I fear that’s what’s going to happen.

Preseason polls had Loyola winning the conference, but that talk was over after Butler ran thru the NIT, and died another death when Wright State got unbelievable hot on in the conference. RPI 108 might have had an outside chance of getting a NIT bid, but they’ve shrunk that tournament by 8 spots.

Loyola still got two chances of making it to post season play, which is at least one more chance than usual:
– win the Horizon league tournament, which they haven’t done since 1985.
– beat Butler at Butler on Thursday, and then possibly beat Butler again (at Wright State) to make it to the Horizon league final

Nothing else is going to get the RPI to a useful level. If they don’t win Thursday against Butler, they’ll get Wright State in the 2/3 league tournament game (assuming they make it that far.) Wright themselves are borderline for making the NIT, so a win over them won’t help Loyola too much – they’d need to beat Butler anyway. If Loyola can beat Butler twice, that’ll not only raise their profile, but a Wright State/Loyola final means either Loyola is going to the NCAAs, or two team from it’s conference are going, which would make it tough to leave out the third team from the NITs.

Either way is going to be tough, but they’ve got chances; two wins out of the three big games will get it done. If they want to be a post season team, they’ve got do post season team type things next couple of weeks.

I haven’t written much about the Carlos stuff because I wrote it – comparing Zambrano to Zito – back in December. The world just took two months to catch up to me.

I loved finding out the incentives in Z’s deal today

He would also earn bonuses for finishing among the top five in Cy Young Award voting, being named MVP of the World Series and League Championship Series, making the All-Star game, and winning the Gold Glove and the Silver Slugger award.

Maybe they were just standards, but I prefer to believe Z insisted on that one being in there.

On another note, I don’t know exactly why, but I’m far less excited for the first real day of the season. Single Game Ticket Day’s on Friday. I’m not excited about anything this week, but I think I’m not as hyped about this team as everyone else.

These are the games I’m thinking about going after

04/14 (SAT) CIN
05/29 (TUE) FLA
06/13 (WED) SEA
07/14 (SAT) HOU

The Houston game is an extra expensive game, the rest are regular priced, and I’m skipping the last two months again just in case (and I can always find tickets if I need ’em.) I went to a White Sox game last year, and I’m now scarred for life, so probably not again.

I need to track down my Kane County tickets before Friday and figure out if I got some duplicates.

* – no recap, but I’ve had this show on my computer for weeks just to fill in the gap – I’ll get to whenever I’m caught up on lucha, ha.

All those pre PPV shows were ‘net exclusives, so they wouldn’t be aired internationally (not really ‘air’ed) at all, and most of them weren’t a hour either. They dropped doing them last year and no one complained.

Okay, but that’s seven episodes, and I was only supposed off six episodes, so I must’ve skipped one. I’m thinking it must be the 09/16/01; MTV was just showing videos that weekend so no Heat aired. Except I guess it must’ve aired in the UK and of course that’ll count for international airings. I know they didn’t count that one on the TiVo Program Info, last I could check.

Should I change my episode numbering? Dunno. Did I waste time on something no one but me cares about? Probably!

Watching part of SmackDown while typing this: What brand is Scotty on? He was back on SmackDown tonight with no one even noticing. Good to see Funaki sticking with his partner. Good to see Jamie Noble is still alive. WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED TO SHANNON MOORE. What brand is he on? The Token Multi-Man Cruiserweight match appears to be occurring one month early. I thought they forget about Jimmy Wayne Yang for a moment. Maybe he and Noble can team up!

Enough of this. Hope everyone likes me listing lucha recaps with everything else, because that’s the way I hope to be doing it now. If there’s any blog posts I feel like I actually work on enough that they need to be noticed, I’ll probably them out on the link list/rss feed.

– So so cold. SO COLD. I’ve spent much too much time sitting around in sub 60 degree rooms for long periods of time this winter. Gotta remedy that.

The highlight of my week was finding out the snowblower would be fixed. In March. And it’ll be broke again by November, somehow.

How exactly are you supposed to measure 50 (gas): 1 (oil), anyway? Are there measuring cups? I know the gas can’s got a little measure on the side and the oil can has one, but even when I do the math, the best I’m doing is eyeballing things and hopefully getting it right. (Which is me saying ‘I wonder if I broke it and have been repetitively? NAH’) The whole system seems ridiculously easy to screw up.

– Speaking of ridiculous, I have a Series 3 TiVo with two HD turners. See, I was gifted a HD TV for New Years Day, and spent six weeks trying to figure out what to do with it. I wasn’t giving up TiVo, but using a Comcast box in between to switch channels failed horribly. The cable box would flip to Comedy Central, the channel would fail to load up immediately, and so it’d just move down a couple channels and record that instead.

Series 3 HD’s has spots to insert cable cards – I can get the digital channels without having the digital box, basically. My old TiVo box had lifetime service, and TiVo had a deal to move that over to new boxes (they don’t otherwise offer that deal) with the cost of a year of normal service, basically.

I’m not sure I’m repeating stuff I’ve talked about before, but it’s my site so I can do that.

I wasn’t sure if wanted to get Series 3, because it ends up being an absurd amount of cost – the $200 transfer fee on top of what it costs to get the box itself (and you might as well get one with extra storage if you’re going to do it) plus the immeasurable cost of dealing with cable companies to set it all up. In this case, it took an hour visit and three follow up phone calls when things didn’t work as they should (and no actual notification from them that it was indeed working fine; just kinda had to notice it myself.)

As odd as it sounds, for something that’s basically a $fourdigit VCR, it’s freaking awesome. It’s getting HD, it’s getting digital cable, it’s having an immense amount of storage room (there’s 120 different recorded shows in Suggestion area and there’s still plenty of space). It’s nice not to have to juggle room for shows or record them all in bad quality to fit like on my old TiVo and it’s great to be able to record in HD, which I guess is only possible on cable company provided boxes. I love being able to watch games on a delay and cut thru all the dead action, and now not only do I have room to do it, it looks a lot better when I do it. Plus, since I own the rare lifetime service, I think I could dump on ebay for good money if I ever forsaked TV or something equally insane.

My life would be exceedingly easier if I they had TivoToGo working on Series 3, but I’ve got a workaround for now and hope they’ll open it up before long.

I still have my old TiVo sitting around, free year of service and all till next Feb, and I’m trying to decide what to do with it. I could stick it on another outlet, but I don’t really need MORE things recording that I won’t watch. I think I’m likely giving it away to a friend, but deciding which friend gets a free TiVo is a tough choice.

I bought it off GameFly because the reviews said it was similar to Final Fantasy Tactics – which I liked, even if it took forever to get thru – and favorable reviewed and it was only about $12 once I used up all my expiring GameFly coupons and such.

It IS like Final Fantasy tactics, because it’s fantasy story driven game, but with an always growing clan of warriors, each with their own skill set and such. The thing is, I thought I was getting an RPG, but this is totally a war game.

In RPGs, no one ever actually dies in battle. They die in the story, for sure, but if your guy runs out of HP in a battle, he’s just KOed or in a coma or whatever, and you could either bring them back during the battle or after it. It’s a temporary condition. In a war game, you run out life, you’re dead and you’re not coming back ever.

And that’s what Fire Emblem is, and that’s what’s driving me nuts. Everyone but the main characters are eligible to be permanently removed from the game (with minimal storyline effect). I can’t play it that way, partly because I think I might need their particular skills later, but mostly because I’m can’t accept the idea of disposable characters. If my army wins the battle but people died along the way, it doesn’t really feel like a win to me, and I’ve got to fix it. I’ve got to do it PERFECT.

The game clearly isn’t meant to be played the way I’ve been trying to play. There’s no way to save in mid battle (the usual tactic to back up and try again), so if I want to ‘fix it’, that means I’ve got repeat 20-40 minute many times until things go right, and that it’s taking me literally ten times as long to play the game as a normal person.

Actually, I’m playing it five times as long, losing my mind after another thought out plan has suffered a single loss, and throwing down the DS while wondering how this is exactly supposed to be entertaining. That’s $12, right there!

This is all ludicrous on my part – you get new troops, you lose old troops, you’re supposed to deal with it – but I just can not do it. It’s like the most annoying puzzle solving game in the history of the world, and I can’t stop going back to it.

The best part is GameFly sent me Final Fantasy 12 (I think? Is that right?) and it’s been sitting on my desk for a week, because I just can’t take gaming any more right now. That’s just dumb. (And I think I’m going to compound the dumb by catching up AAA tonight instead. Someone needs to save me.)